Mauritian Creole Linguistics: An Annotated Bibliography

This is a working bibliography of linguistic work on Mauritian Creole, with every entry checked against a library catalogue, a publisher record or a DOI registry rather than copied from another bibliography. Where a full text is freely available, there is a link.

It exists because the alternative turned out to be unreliable. In compiling it I found four citations that circulate but do not exist, including two that had been sitting on this site's own pages. They are listed at the end, because a list of phantom references is as useful as a list of real ones.

Start here

If you are new to the language, these four are free, sound, and enough to orient yourself.

  • Baker, Philip & Sibylle Kriegel. 2012. "Mauritian Creole dataset." In Michaelis, Maurer & Haspelmath (eds), Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online. apics-online.info/surveys/55. Free, CC BY 4.0. The single most useful short overview: phoneme inventories, the TMA system, the lexical statistics, the settlement chronology. Note that the online dataset is dated 2012 and the print chapter 2013, and they are cited differently.
  • Akademi Kreol Morisien. 2011. Lortograf Kreol Morisien. Phoenix, Mauritius: Ministry of Education and Human Resources, April 2011. 53 pp. plus appendices. ISBN 9789990310184. Free official PDF. The standard orthography, written in Kreol. Technical committee chaired by Arnaud Carpooran.
  • Hassamal, Shrita & Anne Abeillé. 2014. "Degree adverbs in Mauritian." In Stefan Müller (ed.), Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, 259 to 279. Stanford: CSLI. DOI 10.21248/hpsg.2014.14. Free. Far more useful than its title suggests: it contains the most precise published statement of the long and short verb form condition, with many glossed examples.
  • Rajah-Carrim, Aaliya. 2003. A Discussion of Language Tables from the 2000 Population Census of Mauritius. Edinburgh Working Papers in Applied Linguistics 12, 4 to 75. Free PDF. Where the census language figures actually come from, and why the different numbers you see quoted differ.

Reference grammars and descriptions

  • Baker, Philip. 1972. Kreol: A Description of Mauritian Creole. London: C. Hurst & Co. vii, 221 pp. ISBN 0900966890. The foundational description, and still the primary source for the prosody. Note that it contains only about three pages on stress, which is why Mauritian prosody remains under-described.
  • Corne, Chris. 1970. Essai de grammaire du créole mauricien. Auckland: Linguistic Society of New Zealand. 57 pp. Te Reo Monographs.
  • Syea, Anand. 2013. The Syntax of Mauritian Creole. London: Bloomsbury Academic. x, 306 pp. Bloomsbury Studies in Theoretical Linguistics. ISBN 9781441156389. The standing monograph on the syntax, and the place to settle questions the free sources leave open, including which tense and aspect combinations are excluded, and causatives.
  • Police-Michel, Daniella, Arnaud Carpooran & Guilhem Florigny. 2012. Gramer Kreol Morisien, Volim I: Dokiman Referans. Phoenix, Mauritius: Akademi Kreol Morisien and the Ministry of Education. ISBN 9789994920853. The official reference grammar, written in Kreol. The text is dated December 2011 and published February 2012, which is why you see both years.
  • Möst, Mark. 2014. Grammatik des Kreolischen von Mauritius. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 266 pp. VarioLingua 45. ISBN 9783631649435. The most recent full reference grammar, and rarely cited in English-language work.
  • Syea, Anand. 2017. French Creoles: A Comprehensive and Comparative Grammar. London and New York: Routledge. xix, 499 pp. Routledge Comprehensive Grammars. ISBN 9781138244825. Puts Mauritian in comparative context with the Caribbean and Indian Ocean varieties.
  • Baissac, Charles. 1880. Étude sur le patois créole mauricien. Nancy: Imprimerie Berger-Levrault et Cie. lvii, 233 pp. Free scan at Gallica. The nineteenth-century description, and the origin of many of the French-etymological spellings still used informally.

Dictionaries

  • Baker, Philip & Vinesh Y. Hookoomsing. 1987. Diksyoner kreol morisyen: Morisyen, English, français. Paris: L'Harmattan. 365 pp. ISBN 2858029733. The trilingual dictionary behind the lexical statistics most sources quote. The figure of some 15,000 individual words excluding compounds comes from Baker and Kriegel's description of it, not from the book's own front matter, so it should be attributed accordingly.
  • Carpooran, Arnaud. Diksioner Morisien: Premie diksioner kreol monoleng. The first monolingual Kreol dictionary. Edition history: 2005 prototype, Quatre Bornes: Editions Bartholdi, lxx + 253 pp., ISBN 9990386048; 2009 first integral edition, Sainte Croix: Koleksion Text Kreol, 1,020 pp.; 2011 second edition, Sainte Croix: Éditions Le Printemps, vii + 1,201 pp., ISBN 9789994910533; 2019 third edition, 1,400 pp., which is current. The 2011 edition was the first reference work to follow the official orthography.
  • Diksioner Kreol Rodrige. University of Mauritius with the Arts and Culture Commission of Rodrigues, under Arnaud Carpooran's direction. Prototype December 2019, full version launched 22 December 2021. Around 17,000 entries. No international catalogue record exists for it, and reported pagination varies between 1,400 and 1,479 pages, so treat the physical details as unsettled.
  • Ledikasyon pu Travayer. 1984. Diksyoner Kreol, Angle. The first Mauritian Creole dictionary, predating Baker and Hookoomsing. Named in Baker and Kriegel's reference list; I have not verified it against a catalogue.

Orthography and standardisation

These are mostly outside the international catalogue system, so the Ministry of Education's own site and the University of Mauritius publications list are the authoritative sources rather than WorldCat.

  • Hookoomsing, Vinesh Y. 2004. A harmonized writing system for the Mauritian Creole language: Grafi-larmoni. September 2004. Commissioned by the Ministry of Education and Scientific Research and carried out through the University of Mauritius with the Mauritius Institute of Education. An unpublished government report with no catalogue record, which circulates as a third-party scan. The 2011 standard states that it aligned several of its choices to this proposal, so it matters more than its status suggests.
  • Akademi Kreol Morisien. 2011. Lortograf Kreol Morisien. Details above. Later references sometimes call it Rapor Lortograf Kreol Morisien.
  • Regleman ek konvansion lekritir pou Kreol Morisien dapre Lortograf Ofisiel: version abreze gran-piblik. 2015. Creole Speaking Union and University of Mauritius. Conception by Arnaud Carpooran. 11 pp. The short public version of the 2011 report.
  • Akademi Kreol Repiblik Moris. 2024. Rapor Lortograf Kreol Repiblik Moris. Published May 2024 with fourteen contributors, extending the 2011 standard to cover Kreol Rodrige as well as Kreol Morisien. No public text has been located. The citable primary record is the Ministry's own Annual Report 2023 to 2024, which describes it as consolidating the fundamentals rather than changing them. A second edition is reported for 2025.
  • Auckle, Tejshree. 2024. "Orthography, ideology and the codification of Mauritian Creole: The implications of decreasing linguistic Abstand." Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 39(2), 409 to 434. DOI 10.1075/jpcl.22018.auc. Argues that the 2011 standard deliberately moved the written language closer to French as a prestige strategy. The counter-intuitive and most interesting thing written about the orthography.
  • Rajah-Carrim, Aaliya. 2009. "Use and Standardisation of Mauritian Creole in Electronically Mediated Communication." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 14(3), 484 to 508. DOI 10.1111/j.1083-6101.2009.01450.x. The source of the figures on how Mauritians actually spell online. Note the corpus is small, one forum thread, and predates the standard.

Syntax and morphology

  • Guillemin, Diana. 2011. The Syntax and Semantics of a Determiner System: A case study of Mauritian Creole. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. xviii, 310 pp. Creole Language Library 38. DOI 10.1075/cll.38. The monograph on the determiner system, and the source for treating la as a specificity marker rather than a definite article.
  • Guillemin, Diana. 2025. "Evidence of topic-prominence in Mauritian Creole: A typological shift from French to Creole." In Alleesaib & Lefort (eds), chapter 2, 49 to 95. DOI 10.1075/coll.61.02gui. The topic-prominence argument in its published form.
  • Henri, Fabiola. 2010. Une approche constructionnelle des phrases simples du mauricien. PhD, Université Paris Diderot. Supervised by Anne Abeillé and Vinesh Y. Hookoomsing.
  • Henri, Fabiola. 2018. "A lexicalist account of negation and negative concord in Mauritian." In Déprez & Henri (eds), Negation and Negative Concord: The view from Creoles, Contact Language Library 55, 69 to 100. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. The account of Mauritian as a strict negative concord language.
  • Henri, Fabiola. 2021. "Morphomic structure in Mauritian Kreol: On change, complexity and creolization." Morphology 31(4), 447 to 489. DOI 10.1007/s11525-021-09383-9. Argues the long and short verb alternation is morphomic, reducible to neither phonology nor morphosyntax.
  • van der Wal, Jenneke & Tonjes Veenstra. 2015. "The long and short of verb alternations in Mauritian Creole and Bantu languages." Folia Linguistica 49(1), 85 to 116. DOI 10.1515/flin-2015-0003. Against a purely prosodic account of the alternation, and the source of the remark that there are simply not enough data on Mauritian prosody.
  • Syea, Anand. 2024. "Absence of syntactic passive in creoles: Evidence from French-based Mauritian Creole." Canadian Journal of Linguistics 69(2), 174 to 202. DOI 10.1017/cnj.2024.13. Free, CC BY 4.0. Argues Mauritian has no real passive and that fronted objects sit in topic position. Directly against Baker and Kriegel.
  • Syea, Anand. 1997. "Copula, wh-trace, and the ECP in Mauritian Creole." Linguistics 35(1), 25 to 56. DOI 10.1515/ling.1997.35.1.25.
  • Grant, Anthony & Diana Guillemin. 2012. "The complex of creole typological features: The case of Mauritian Creole." Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 27(1). DOI 10.1075/jpcl.27.1.02gra. Often misattributed to Syea.
  • Strandquist, Rachel Eva. 2005. Article Incorporation in Mauritian Creole. MA thesis, University of Victoria. Free PDF. The most extensive wordlists of agglutinated forms available. Be aware the scan is optical, and a handful of entries and etymologies came through corrupted.
  • Baker, Philip. 1984. "Agglutinated French articles in Creole French: their evolutionary significance." Te Reo 27. The classic paper on agglutination. Note that Baker published a second, distinct piece on the same subject in the same year, "The significance of agglutinated French articles in the creole languages of the Indian Ocean and elsewhere", York Papers in Linguistics 11, 19 to 29, and the two are easily conflated.
  • Hassamal, Shrita. 2017. Grammaire des adverbes en mauricien. PhD, Université Sorbonne Paris Cité, defended 7 July 2017. Supervised by Anne Abeillé.
  • Alleesaib, Muhsina. 2025. On relative clauses, in Alleesaib & Lefort (eds), chapter 4, 119 to 134.
  • Melara, Emilia. 2025. "Mauritian root modals are raising verbs." In Alleesaib & Lefort (eds), chapter 3, 96 to 118. Her only published work on Mauritian; her 2016 conference paper on null subjects was never published.

Phonology

The thinnest area, and worth saying so. Beyond Baker and Kriegel's inventories there is very little, and the prosody in particular rests on three pages of Baker 1972.

  • Baker, Philip. 2014. "Accounting for contact-induced changes in Mauritian Creole." Paper presented at Grammatical hybridization and social conditions, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, 16 to 18 October 2014. Slides, free. A presentation rather than a publication, but the source for the vowel reduction relative to French and the rise of the affricates.
  • Corne, Chris. 1982. "The predicate in Isle de France Creole." In Baker & Corne, Isle de France Creole, Ann Arbor: Karoma. The prosodic account of the long and short verb forms that Henri and van der Wal and Veenstra argue against. Note that sources disagree on the page range within that volume.
  • Florigny, Guilhem & Rachel Sapermal. 2025. "(Re)defining the classification of Mauritian French varieties through a phonemic and phonetic approach." In Alleesaib & Lefort (eds), chapter 10, 279 to 323. DOI 10.1075/coll.61.10flo. On Mauritian French, not Creole. Frequently miscited as being about the creole.

History, genesis and early texts

  • Baker, Philip & Chris Corne. 1982. Isle de France Creole: Affinities and Origins. Ann Arbor: Karoma. viii, 299 pp. ISBN 0897200489. The argument that Réunionnais influence on Mauritian was minimal and that the two formed largely independently. The central text in the genesis debate.
  • Baker, Philip & Guillaume Fon Sing (eds). 2007. The Making of Mauritian Creole: Analyses diachroniques à partir des textes anciens. London: Battlebridge. Westminster Creolistics Series 9. ISBN 9781903292143. The standard collection on the early textual record.
  • Baissac, Charles. 1888. Le Folk-lore de l'Île-Maurice (texte créole et traduction française). Paris: Maisonneuve et Ch. Leclerc. xix, 466 pp. Les Littératures populaires de toutes les nations 27. Free scan. Creole text with facing French translation, and the main body of nineteenth-century Mauritian Creole text. A frequent citation error: the 1888 first edition was Maisonneuve et Ch. Leclerc, not Maisonneuve et Larose, which is the 1967 reprint's imprint. Re-edited by Carpooran as Folklore Lil Moris in 2024.

Sociolinguistics, policy and education

  • Stein, Peter. 1982. Connaissance et emploi des langues à l'Île Maurice. Hamburg: Helmut Buske. xxii, 661 pp. Kreolische Bibliothek 2. ISBN 3871185043. A large survey of who knows and uses which language in Mauritius.
  • Carpooran, Arnaud. 2003. Île Maurice: des langues et des lois. Paris: L'Harmattan. 280 pp. ISBN 2747541738. Language policy and law.
  • Pustka, Elissa & Yannick Bosquet. 2025. "Fuzzy boundaries between Creole and French in the Mauritian Linguistic Landscape." Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, online first, 4 December 2025. DOI 10.1075/jpcl.25001.pus. Free, CC BY 4.0. Not yet assigned to an issue, so it has no volume or page numbers. On how French orthography masks Creole structures in public writing.
  • Oozeerally, Shameem. 2025. On technical vocabulary, in Alleesaib & Lefort (eds), chapter 7, 207 to 228.
  • Frew, Mark. 2003. Mauritian Creole in Seven Easy Lessons. Port Louis: Ledikasyon pu Travayer. 59 pp. ISBN 9990333491. Uses the Ledikasyon pu Travayer orthography, not the official one.

Corpora, datasets and computational work

A recent and fast-moving area, and easy to miss if you are reading only the descriptive literature.

  • Dabre, Raj & Aneerav Sukhoo. 2022. "KreolMorisienMT: A Dataset for Mauritian Creole Machine Translation." Findings of the ACL: AACL-IJCNLP 2022, 22 to 29. DOI 10.18653/v1/2022.findings-aacl.3. Free, with the dataset attached. The arXiv preprint is titled MorisienMT, so the two are sometimes cited as separate papers.
  • Ramsurrun, Neha, Rolando Coto-Solano & Michael Gonzalez. 2024. "Parsing for Mauritian Creole Using Universal Dependencies." LREC-COLING 2024, 12622 to 12632. Free. The Universal Dependencies treebank, currently small at 161 sentences and just over a thousand tokens.
  • Lent, Heather, Kushal Tatariya, Raj Dabre and others. 2024. "CreoleVal: Multilingual Multitask Benchmarks for Creoles." Transactions of the ACL 12, 950 to 978. DOI 10.1162/tacl_a_00682. Open access. Includes Morisyen.
  • Robinson, Nathaniel and others. 2025. "Findings of the First Shared Task for Creole Language Machine Translation at WMT25." Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Machine Translation, 520 to 531. Free. Produced new Mauritian Creole test sets.

Reference databases

  • Glottolog, languoid mori1278, name Morisyen. Free.
  • ISO 639-3 code mfe, reference name Morisyen.
  • Library of Congress authority sh2017003644. Worth noting that the authorised heading is "Morisyen language", with "Mauritian Creole language" recorded only as a variant.
  • Ethnologue, entry mfe. Subscription only.

Cited for Mauritian, but not about Mauritian

These three are real and respectable, and all three turn up in bibliographies supporting claims about Mauritian Creole that they cannot support. If you find one cited for a Mauritian fact, check the fact.

  • Holm, John A. 1989. Pidgins and Creoles, Volume 2: Reference Survey. Cambridge University Press. A worldwide survey giving Mauritian a few pages. Note the year: volume 2 is 1989, and volume 1, Theory and Structure, is 1988. A citation to "Holm 1988, volume 2" is wrong on its face.
  • Lefebvre, Claire. 1998. Creole Genesis and the Acquisition of Grammar: The Case of Haitian Creole. Cambridge University Press. Entirely about Haitian.
  • Alleyne, Mervyn C. 1980. Comparative Afro-American. Ann Arbor: Karoma. About English-lexifier Atlantic creoles. Mauritian is French-lexifier and Indian Ocean, so it falls outside the book's scope altogether.

Citations that do not exist

All four of these are in circulation. Two were on this site's own pages until September 2026, which is the reason this bibliography was compiled. If you meet any of them, in a bibliography, a student essay or the output of a language model, it is not a work you can obtain.

  • "Corne, C. 1970. Mauritian Creole Reflexes of the French Definite Article. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 86(1), 35 to 44." No such article. The Linguistic Society of New Zealand's bibliography of Corne's published work lists no Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie item anywhere in his career, and his only 1970 publication is the Essai de grammaire above.
  • "Syea, A. 1996. The Syntax of Mauritian Creole: A Case Study of Creole Genesis and Language Change. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 11(2), 273 to 306." No such article. That issue of that journal contains work by Singler, Lefebvre and Winford, and the claimed page range falls inside Lefebvre's article. The citation appears to be a corruption of Syea's 2013 monograph, which has almost the same title.
  • "Lafage, S. 1993. Le créole mauricien: Étude grammaticale et lexicale. Paris: L'Harmattan." No such book, in any catalogue or in L'Harmattan's own list. Suzanne Lafage was a real scholar, but her catalogued work is on French in West Africa and none of it concerns Mauritius or any creole.
  • "Stein, P. 1982. Creole Languages in the Caribbean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press." No such book. The real Stein 1982 is Connaissance et emploi des langues à l'Île Maurice, Hamburg: Helmut Buske, which is genuinely about Mauritius. The author and year are right and the title and publisher are invented.

One further pattern worth knowing: Baker 1972 is very frequently miscited. It is Kreol: A Description of Mauritian Creole, London: C. Hurst & Co. It is not published by Croom Helm, and it is not titled Mauritian Creole: Its Characteristics and Origins. "University of Westminster Press" is an anachronism, since that institution was the Polytechnic of Central London until 1992; Baker later worked at Westminster and the book sits in that university's repository, which is the likely source of the error.

Notes on method and on gaps

Every entry above was checked against a library catalogue, a publisher table of contents, a DOI registry, a national thesis register or, for the Mauritian official documents, the issuing body's own publication. The Mauritian government and University of Mauritius material is largely outside the international catalogue system, so for those items the Ministry of Education's own site and the University's publications list are authoritative and WorldCat is not.

Entries where something remains unsettled are flagged in place. The main ones: the page range of Baker's 1984 Te Reo article, the page range of Corne's 1982 chapter, the authorship and pagination of the Diksioner Kreol Rodrige, the pagination of the Gramer Kreol Morisien, and the contents of the 2024 orthography report, which has not been publicly distributed.

Corrections are welcome and will be credited. If you have a physical copy of any of the flagged items, the page ranges in particular would be worth settling.

How to cite this page

Pillay, Issaiyanee. Mauritian Creole Linguistics: An Annotated Bibliography. Issai Teach. issaiteach.org/pages/mauritian-creole-linguistics-bibliography. Accessed [date].

Where to go next

Compiled September 2026.